Rene Girard argues that all culture is founded on sacred
violence. While this may be true on theoretical grounds, what is empirical
evidence? A remarkable observation is that all primal cultures either engage in
blood sacrifice or have myths that relate back to blood sacrifice. There are
some traditions that reject the human desire to participate in mimetic rivalry
or to engage in vengeance, most notably Buddhism. However, as Brit Johnson
argues, http://www.internet.cybermesa.com/~brittonthis reflects a conscious effort
to expunge the human desire to participate in mimetic rivalries and does not
necessarily refute the claim that the larger culture was founded on sacred
violence.

Girard and his students have looked at a wide range of myths
and found that they consistently both reveal and conceal the scapegoating
mechanism. They reveal the mechanism in that they recall a person or “monster”
who created chaos who was killed by the god(s) or the community. They conceal
the mechanism by asserting that the god(s) killed the victim or demanded the
victim’s death for evil deeds. In other words, what they conceal is the victim’s
innocence and the fact that their culture was founded on murder.

For example, The Nawatl Aztec’s ritual for the renewal of fire
(recorded circa 1500) recreated the communal killing of a victim as the origin
of culture. First, all blankets were burned and pottery destroyed (to re-enact
an original, pre-civilization state). Then, the sacrificial victim was placed
atop a pyramid and had his chest cavity opened up and his heart ripped out. A
bowl of tinder was placed in the chest cavity and a fire was started by rubbing
sticks. The new fire lit a torch that was passed from torch to torch throughout
the community.

In a given culture, there is no reason to doubt the
truthfulness of the myths. The myths offer an explanation for the origins of the
Universe in general and the given culture in particular. The myths recall the
collective, “sacred” violence, but the scapegoating mechanism makes it
impossible for the killers to realize that they have engaged in collective
murder. That is, they don’t recognize that the victim, while not always totally
innocent of all wrongdoing, is not nearly as guilty as accused, and therefore
not nearly as deserving of punishment as the mob believes. The myth that evolves
from the event, then, invariably describes the victim as guilty and deserving to
die, and this lie becomes the foundation for the culture. This lie also tells
people how they are central to the designs of the god(s), in part because they
have carried out divinely ordained sacrifice. Their ancestors were unified after
destroying forces of evil and chaos—forces that they attributed to the victim of
sacred violence but were in fact a manifestation of the divisive nature of their
own mimetic desire (see Parts 2 &
5). Therefore, the lie about the victim’s
guilt forms the foundation for their convictions about what is right and wrong;
meaningful and irrelevant; and true and false about the mysterious universe in
which we live. This is the lie that has been “hidden since the foundation of the
world” (Matthew 13:35)—the lie that Jesus will expose.

Because the lie forms the foundation for all knowledge and all
values, it should be impossible for the given culture to recognize its
foundational story as hiding the truth of the victim’s innocence. Even
scientists would be incapable of exposing the lie. Scientists like to think of
themselves as objective, but in truth science is a cultural enterprise that
reflects the values, biases, and beliefs of a given culture. What questions
scientists pursue, how they design and execute experiments, and how they
interpret results are all culture-laden choices. This is not to say that the
sciences tell us nothing meaningful about the world, but humans determine what
is it means to be “meaningful.”

Therefore, anyone who might question the guilt of the original
victim (and later sacrificial victims deemed to resemble the original victim)
would be seen as insane and/or satanic; it would challenge the beliefs, held by
everyone enmeshed in that culture, about what is good, meaningful, and true.

How, then, did Girard come to recognize the scapegoating
mechanism? After all, he’s a product of his culture as much as the rest of us.
The answer, he says, is that we have the Bible. The Bible is distinctive in that
it reveals the innocence of victims, from Abel to the prophets to Jesus to St.
Stephen. And, only because of the biblical revelation can the modern sciences
assist in our understanding of sacred violence. Regardless of whether a given
scientist is Christian, or even believes in God, all scientists now grow up in a
culture that has a strong tradition of recognizing the innocence of victims,
thanks to the Bible.

What has science shown? The branch of the social sciences
known as cultural anthropology has demonstrated that sacred violence is
universal. It is with this knowledge that we may recognize our own scapegoating.
Without the Bible, we might regard scapegoating by other cultures with contempt,
but we would not recognize our own scapegoating. As we will see in the next
several weeks, the Bible has revealed the scapegoating mechanism, which can
easily ensnare anyone. Since the Bible's revelation cannot derive from human
culture (which always hides the truth of the victim's innocence) it follows that
the Bible must have had influence from outside human culture—a divine influence,
if you will. Next week, we’ll start to look at our foundation story--the Book of
Genesis.